When the Emperor Was Divine (9 page)

SUMMER WAS a long hot dream. Every morning, as soon as the sun rose, the temperature began to soar. By noon the floors were sagging. The sky was bleached white from the heat and the wind was hot and dry. Yellow dust devils whirled across the sand. The black roofs baked in the sun. The air shimmered.

The boy tossed pebbles into the coal bucket. He peered into other people's windows. He drew pictures of airplanes and tanks with his favorite stick in the sand. He traced out an SOS in huge letters across the firebreak but before anyone could read what he had written he wiped the letters away.

Late at night he lay awake on top of the sheets longing for ice, a section of orange, a stone, something, anything, to suck on, to quench his thirst. It was June now. Or maybe it was July. It was August. The calendar had fallen from the wall. The tin clock had stopped ticking. Its gears were clotted with dust and would not turn. His sister was sound asleep on her cot and his mother lay dreaming behind the white curtain. He lifted a hand to his mouth. There was a loose molar there, on top, way in back. He liked to touch it. To rock it back and forth in its socket. The motion soothed him. Sometimes he'd taste blood and then he'd swallow. Salty, he'd think to himself, like the sea. In the distance he could hear trains passing in the night. The pounding of hooves on the sand. The faint tinkle of a tin bell.

He'd close his eyes. That's him, he'd think. He's on his way.

HE COULD COME BACK on a horse. On a bike. In a train. On a plane. In the same unmarked car that had once taken him away. He could be wearing a blue pin-striped suit. A red silk kimono. A grass skirt. A cowboy hat. A halo. A dark gray fedora with a leaf tucked up under the brim. Maybe he'd touch it—the leaf—and then he'd raise his hand slowly into the air, as though he were Jesus, or the man with the withered arm, or even General Douglas MacArthur. “I have returned,” he'd say. Then his eyes would light up and he'd reach down into his pocket and pull out a single white pearl. “I found this by the side of the road,” he'd say. “Any idea whose it might be?”

It could happen like that.

OR MAYBE the boy would be lying in bed one night and he'd hear a knock, a soft tap. “Who is it?” he'd say. “It's me.” He'd open the door and see his father standing there in his white flannel bathrobe all covered with dust. “It's a long walk from Lordsburg,” his father would say. Then they would shake hands, or maybe they'd even hug.

“Did you get my letters?” he'd ask his father.

“You bet I did. I read every single one of them. I got that leaf, too. I thought of you all the time.”

“I thought of you too,” the boy would say.

He'd bring his father a glass of water and they would sit down side by side on the cot. Outside the window the moon would be bright and round. The wind would be blowing. He'd rest his head on his father's shoulder and smell the dust and the sweat and the faint smell of Burma Shave and everything would be very nice. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he'd notice his father's big toe sticking out through a hole in his slipper. “Papa,” he'd say.

“What is it?”

“You forgot to put on your shoes.”

His father would look down at his feet and he'd shake his head with surprise. “Son of a gun,” he'd say. “Would you look at that.” Then he'd just shrug. He'd lean back on the cot and make himself comfortable. He'd pull out his pipe. A box of matches. He'd smile. “Now tell me what I missed,” he'd say. “Tell me everything.”

IN A STRANGER'S BACKYARD

When we came back after the war it was fall and the house was still ours. The trees on the streets were taller than we remembered, and the cars more run down, and the rosebush our mother had once planted alongside the narrow gravel path that led up to the front steps of our house was no longer there. We had left in the spring, when the magnolia trees were still in bloom, but now it was fall and the leaves on the trees were beginning to turn and where our mother's rosebush had once stood there was only a clump of dead weeds. Broken bottles were scattered across the yard, and the juniper hedge by the side of the porch looked as though it had not been watered, even once, during the years we had been away.

We carried our dusty suitcases up the narrow gravel path. It was late in the day and a cool breeze was blowing in off the bay and in the yard of the house next door a man in his shirt sleeves was slowly raking leaves. We did not know him. He was not the same man who had lived in that house before the war. He leaned on his rake and nodded once in our direction but our mother did not wave to him or nod her head, even slightly, in return. There were many people, she had warned us, who would not be happy to learn we had come back into town. Perhaps this man was one of these people—a member of the American Legion, or the Homefront Commandos, or one of the Native Sons of the Golden West—or perhaps he was simply a man with a rake our mother had chosen not to see, we did not know.

At the top of the porch steps she reached into her blouse and pulled out the key to the front door, which she had worn, on a long silver chain, the entire time we had been away. Every morning, in the place where we had lived during the war, she had reached for the key as soon as she woke, just to make sure it was still there. And every evening, before she closed her eyes, she had touched the key one last time. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, she had stroked its jagged ridges with her thumb as she stared out the barrack window. Once, when she thought no one was looking, we even saw her put it into her mouth and close her eyes with delight. It was spring, and the air smelled of sage, and she was reading a letter from our father. We turned our heads away. The key had become a part of her. It was always there, a small, dark shape, dangling—visibly and sometimes invisibly, depending on the light, and what she was wearing, and even, at times, it seemed, on her mood—just beneath the surface of her clothes. If she took it off, surely terrible things would happen. Our house—that faraway speck on the map—would fall down, or go up in flames, or simply disappear. The war would last forever. Our mother would cease to be.

But now we watched as she pulled the chain up over her head—she did this effortlessly, naturally, as though it were something she did every day—and slid the key into the lock. Her hands were steady. Her fingers did not tremble. The wind was blowing through the branches of the trees and in the yard next door a man we did not know was slowly raking leaves. Our mother had not waved to him. She turned the key once in the lock. She turned the key twice. We heard a click and then the door swung open and she took off her hat and stepped into the foyer and after three years and five months we were suddenly, finally, home.

THE HOUSE DID NOT smell good. We did not care. The paint was peeling away from the walls and the window frames were black with rot. Shreds of lace curtain dangled in front of the soot-covered panes and the floor was littered with empty food tins and shards of broken glass. Against the far wall where the piano had once stood we saw our mother's felt-covered card table beneath a pile of old newspapers. Nearby, in the corner, three folding chairs. A metal stool. A broken gooseneck lamp. The rest of our furniture was gone. It did not matter. We were home. We were lucky to be home. Many of the people who had come back with us on the train had no homes to return to at all. Tonight they would be sleeping in hostels and churches and on cots at the YMCA.

We put down our things and ran from one room to the next shouting out, “Fire! Help! Wolf!” simply because we could. We flung open the windows and doors. The smell of the sea blew through the empty rooms of the house and soon the other smell, the smell of people we did not know (they drank milk, they ate butter, they ate cheese, all these things our mother claimed she could tell from their smell) began to fade away.

We had not smelled the sea in years.

In the kitchen we turned on the faucet and watched the water come pouring out of the pipes. At first the water was brown with rust and then it ran clear. We lowered our heads to the faucet and drank. Our throats were dry from the long ride back and our clothes were covered with dust. Our mother let the water run over her hands and then she turned off the faucet and wiped her hands on the front of her dress and walked out the back door and into the yard and stood on the tall weedy grass in the shade of the trees as the leaves fell all around her.

This was a strange and unfamiliar sight: our mother, in shade, beneath trees. We watched as she caught a falling leaf in her hand and held it up to the light. We watched as she let the leaf go. In the place we had come from there was sun but no shade and the only time we ever saw trees was at night, in our dreams.

MANY PEOPLE HAD LIVED in our house while we were away but we did not know who they were, or where they had gone, or why we had never received a single check in the mail from the man who had promised to rent out our house. This man was a lawyer, his name was Milt Parker, he had shown up at our door the day after the evacuation orders had been posted and offered our mother his services. “I'll take care of everything,” Mr. Parker had said. But where was he now? And where was our money? And why had our mother been so quick to open the door to a stranger? Because strangers had knocked on our door before. And what had happened? Nothing good. Nothing good. They had taken our father away.

“Fool,” our mother said now, “I was a fool.”

Upstairs, in the rooms where we had once slept, and dreamed, and many times fought, we found soiled mattresses and old magazines filled with pictures of naked young men and women. Their bodies were perfect. Their skin, smooth and pale. Their limbs were wrapped around each other in ways we did not yet know were possible. “You'll know soon enough,” we heard our mother utter softly, under her breath, as she tossed the magazines aside, although later she would deny that this was true. (But it
was
true, she
had
said it, we
would
know.)

At the end of the hall, in the room where she had locked up our most valuable things—the View-Master, the Electrolux, our collection of old
Dime Detectives
, the wedding china that she had set out only on Sundays (
Why didn't we use those dishes every day of the week?
she would later ask)—there was hardly anything left at all. Empty boxes were scattered across the floor, and on top of the windowsill, lined up in a neat row, stood the remnants of some long-ago game of Monopoly: a pair of white dice, a tiny red hotel, the smallest green wooden house in the world.

Water had seeped through a crack in the ceiling and on the walls there were brown stains and words scrawled in red ink that made us turn away. “We will paint them over,” said our mother, and several months later, when we had money to buy paint, we did, but for years we could not get those words out of our heads.

THAT NIGHT, the night of our first day back in the world, the world from which we had earlier been sent away, we locked all the windows and doors and unrolled our blankets on the floor of the room at the foot of the stairs that looked out onto the street. Without thinking, we had sought out the room whose dimensions—long and narrow, with two windows on one end and a door at the other—most closely resembled those of the room in the barracks in the desert where we had lived during the war. Without thinking, we had configured ourselves exactly as we had in that long narrow room during the war: our mother in the far corner, away from the windows, the two of us lying head to toe along the wall on the opposite side of the room. Without thinking, we had chosen to sleep, together, in a room, with our mother, even though for more than three years we had been dreaming of the day when we could finally sleep, alone, in our own rooms, in our old house, our old white stucco house on the broad tree-lined street not far from the sea.

When the war is over,
our mother had said.

As we tried to fall asleep in that white stucco house we could not stop thinking of the stories we had heard about the people who had come back before us. One man's house had been doused with gasoline and set on fire while his family lay sleeping inside. Another man's shed had been dynamited. There had been shootings in the valley, and gravestone defacings, and unannounced visitors knocking on doors in the middle of the night.

Nice to see you again, neighbor. How long do you plan on
staying in town?

There aren't any jobs here. I'd think about moving on if I
were you.

People around here have got plans for you.

Plans, we wondered. What kinds of plans?

For what seemed like hours we lay awake beneath the blankets in our very best clothes—“We will
not
be caught dead in our pajamas,” our mother had said— waiting for the sound of gunfire, or a sharp rap on the door, but all we heard was the wind in the trees and the passing of cars outside on the street and finally, toward dawn, the familiar sound of our mother snoring.

WE WERE FREE NOW, free to go wherever we wanted to go, whenever we pleased. There were no more armed guards, no more searchlights, no more barbed-wire fences. Our mother went out to the market and brought back the first fresh pears we had eaten in years. She brought back eggs, and rice, and many cans of beans. When our ration books arrived, she told us, she would buy us fresh meat. She dug up the silver she had buried in the garden before we had left and she set the card table for three. The knives were still sharp. The forks and spoons had not lost their shine. As we sat down in our chairs she reminded us to eat slowly, with our mouths closed and our heads held high above our plates. “Don't
shovel,
” she said.

But we could not help ourselves. We were hungry. We were ravenous. We ate quickly, greedily, as though we were still in the mess hall barracks, where whoever finished first got seconds and slow eaters were left behind to make do with only one serving.

Later on, in the evening, we turned on the radio and heard one of the same programs we had listened to before the war—
The Green Hornet—
and it was as if we had never been away at all. Nothing's changed, we said to ourselves. The war had been an interruption, nothing more. We would pick up our lives where we had left off and go on. We would go back to school again. We would study hard, every day, to make up for lost time. We would seek out our old classmates. “Where
were
you?” they'd ask, or maybe they would just nod and say, “Hey.” We would join their clubs, after school, if they let us. We would listen to their music. We would dress just like they did. We would change our names to sound more like theirs. And if our mother called out to us on the street by our real names we would turn away and pretend not to know her. We would never be mistaken for the enemy again!

THE TOWN SEEMED much the same as before. Grove Street was still Grove, and Tyler Street still Tyler. The pharmacy was still there at the end of the block, only now it had a new sign. The mornings were still foggy. The parks were still green. Swings still hung down from the trees (swings will always hang down from the trees) and children—well fed, laughing, with their heads tossed back into the wind—still swung. The girls on the streets still wore black Mary Janes. Their mothers still wore black pumps. The old man in the rumpled gray fedora was still standing at the corner calling out for his lost dog, Isadora, who had run away long long ago. Perhaps he is standing there still.

In the windows of the houses on our block we saw the faces of our old friends and neighbors: the Gilroys and the Myers, the Leahys, the Wongs, the two elderly Miss O'Gradys, from whose yard not a single tossed ball had ever been returned. They had all seen us leave, at the beginning of the war, had peered out through their curtains as we walked down the street with our enormous overstuffed suitcases. But none of them came out, that morning, to wish us goodbye, or good luck, or ask us where it was we were going (we didn't know). None of them waved.

They're afraid,
our mother had said.

Keep on walking.

Hold your head up.

Whatever you do, don't look back.

Now when we ran into these same people on the street they turned away and pretended not to see us. Or they nodded in passing and said, “Gorgeous day,” as though we had not been away at all. Once in a while someone would stop and ask our mother where we had been—“Haven't seen you for a while,” that person might say, or “It's been
ages
”—and our mother simply lifted her head and smiled and replied, “Oh, away.”

For it was true. We had gone away and now we were back but our father had yet to come join us. In his letters he said he would be released any day now, any day. But when that day would be he could not say for sure. It could be tomorrow, or two weeks from tomorrow. It could be in six months.

Would he know who we were when he stepped off the train? (We were older now, and darker, from all the years in the sun. We had grown.)

What would he be wearing?

Would he have any hair left?

What would his first words be?
(I'd like to . . . I'd love
a . . . You don't know how I've . . . )

And was it true, what we'd heard?
(Disloyal . . . a traitor . . . a great fan of the Emperor's.)